Derrida, founder of deconstructionism, dies at 74

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Philosopher Jacques Derrida, at his home in Ris-Orangis, south of Paris.Photo: AFP

French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the founder of the school of deconstructionism, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 74.

Algerian-born Derrida, who divided his time between France and the United States, argued that the traditional way we read texts makes a number of false assumptions and that they have multiple meanings that even their author may not have understood.

His thinking gave rise to the school of deconstruction, a method of analysis that has been applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture.

It is heralded as showing the multiple layers of meaning at work in language, but was described by critics as nihilistic.

"In him, France gave the world one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement after learning of his death.

"Through his work, he sought to find the free movement which lies at the root of all thinking."

Born into a Jewish family, Derrida began studying philosophy at the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in 1952 and taught at Paris' Sorbonne University from 1960 to 1964.

From the early 1970s, Derrida spent much of his time teaching in the United States, at such universities as Johns Hopkins, Yale and the University of California at Irvine.

His ideas were seen as showing unavoidable tensions between the ideals of clarity and coherence that govern philosophy. He was seen as the inheritor of "anti-philosophy", the school of thought with predecessors such as Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

Derrida's work was at times controversial. Some staff at Britain's Cambridge University protested when the university proposed awarding him an honorary degree in 1992, though he did eventually receive it.

In the early 1980s, he was detained in Prague after displeasing Czechoslovakia's Communists by giving a lecture on deconstructionist theory.

Derrida was once married to Sylvaine Agacinski, who is now the wife of former French Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. Derrida and Ms Agacinski had one son.